John Wayne is synonymous with the Western genre. His name conjures images of larger-than-life cowboys, rough-edged heroes, and swift gunslinging. But when he produced his first Western, Angel and the Badman in 1947, in which he also starred, he departed from this familiar mold. Not only did Wayne portray a character that deviated substantially from his typical roles, the film itself was nothing like anything that had been seen before in the genre. Wayne played the morally conflicted outlaw Quirt Evans, a character thrown into the unfamiliar Old West of pacifism, love, and redemption. These concepts had not been explored deeply before in the rugged, action-driven Westerns of the time.